While millions of Americans were dismayed to hear about the National Security Agency’s secret PRISM program that reportedly tracked Internet data, the tech giants that were named in the documents have said that they were also blindsided by the reports. Google, Microsoft and Facebook, who have all denied knowing about PRISM, are now requesting that Justice Department release the records of the NSA’s data requests.
As we previously reported in the hours after the Guardian and the Washington Post published a PowerPoint presentation that revealed how PRISM worked, several of the tech giants named as cooperating with the government claimed that they never heard of the program before. They stressed that user privacy is important and that they would never give data away.
On Tuesday, Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond published a letter it sent to Attorney General Eric Holder, writing, “Google has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our users’ trust. For example, we offer encryption across our services; we have hired some of the best security engineers in the world; and we have consistently pushed back on overly broad government requests for our users’ data.”
Drummond again denied that Google ever gave complete access to the government and said that whenever requests are made for information, it narrows down the scope.
“We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope,” he wrote. “Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Facebook and Microsoft have made similar requests.
“We were as shocked about those revelations as anyone,” Drummond told Fox News. “There's no lockbox, there's no backdoor -- none of the other terms that you've seen in the past few days...We comply with orders, we deliver information when we receive these targeted orders.”
USA Today also reported Tuesday that the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the Obama Administration. "The program goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said.